Tuesday June 30, 2015

Allen Lepke, Managed Services Product
Manager

Confucius once said... "In the world there are many different
roads but the destination is the same." While we're quite certain
he wasn't talking about backup
and recovery of your workstations, servers and data,
there is an application in there somewhere. There are many ways to
provide backup of your most precious data and devices - and they
all lead to the same destination - an ability to recover. But are
they all the same?

Let's look at two general types of backup and discover
whether the "destination" is truly the same - Local and
Cloud.

You're already familiar with local backups - you most likely use
them every day. They could be tape or disk-based, utilizing
expensive hardware that needs to be refreshed, and are really only
useful for on-premise restores (meaning, in the event of a disaster
that requires recovery off-site, you're either going to need to
physically move the backup system to the new site or you're simply
out of luck).

Then there's cloud backups. They provide high availability and
redundancy at a lower cost than local hardware and can recover to
anywhere in the world. They also are limited by your Internet
connection and, if you have no connection, can be rendered
useless.

So what's a business to do?

Each "road" has its' downsides in getting to the recovery
"destination". The answer lies in taking both paths. You need the
speed of local backups and the scalability, redundancy and
"anytime, anywhere" recoverability of the cloud. This is what's
known as hybrid cloud backup & recovery. By using a hybrid
cloud solution, you take advantage of a monthly expense over making
costly purchases, have the assurance that you can recover the
smallest file or the largest database no matter where you need to
recover to, and utilize the fastest recovery medium to ensure you
are operational quickly. You also partner with a service provider
to ensure every aspect of your business is recovered within an
acceptable timeframe.

It's a win-win

When it comes to backup and recovery, Confucius was a bit off -
he'd be more likely to say, "to get to the destination, use both
paths together."